 There's a lot that goes into demonstrating, the skydive is just a small piece of what you're the display that you're making. And then once you get out your instincts take over that you've trained this and you know how to do it and then it's generally not scary anymore. 13 years this is the beginning of my 14th year. The choices that I had made prior set it up for me a little bit, ended up joining the reserve and then when I was in college I started skydiving as a civilian and then when I found out about the team and that I could skydive for the army it seemed like a great opportunity that I had to look into. When I got back from basic training I wanted to like celebrate being an adult and I had a skydiver in one of my classes and so I chatted with her a little bit and since I had a little bit of background in it that's the route I ended up going. I went through the ground school that you go through I did my first jump it went terribly didn't do anything they told me to do and I lost both my instructors and I pulled 10,000 feet and I landed in a cornfield so I've gotten a little bit better since then so I just kept at it and I made it through started jumping on my own. I went on a deployment and when I came back I had decided that I was gonna try out for the Golden Knights. I have I'm just coming up on 8,000 jumps. It definitely is mentally and physically exhausting to do that but that's the best way to prepare for competition and you still have that performance anxiety so the best way to combat that is to just do as much training as you can and trust yourself and trust your training that you'll you'll know how to perform when you get out of there. We're going to dirt dive what we're gonna go through so you want to take care of any of those unknowns and get rid of any of the variables that you can and make sure those are set. We'll do our pinchecks to make sure everything is where it needs to be on the rig and you didn't bump it in a certain way. Then we go ahead and get on the bus we also go over what we're gonna do again and then when we get out to the plane we do another pin check and we'll dirt dive everything again and then get on the plane we'll do our final pin check and then we can visualize and get ready for what we're going to do in the sky. When I originally came to the team I was on the gold demonstration team. We had some semblance of that ritual and then it evolves as people come through and switch out and then they they change things. It was kind of cool to come back to that and to get to experience that again because it takes a little bit to learn. It gives you that cohesion with the group. Right before we're about to get out we'll do handshakes with each other and a lot of people have like individual handshakes. Those handshakes can be like an inside joke with that person so that's just kind of a little bit of a flavor of the current team. It's almost like learning a new language. Flying is it's like a body language that you have to learn. I'm chasing that feeling of when I know what I'm doing without thinking about it and the aircraft can become like an extension of me. The world meet in 2016 my women's four-way team won that year and it was kind of the culmination of a six-year project and in 2018 at the world meet I was on the eight-way team and we won there too. I was only the second woman in skydiving history to be an eight-way world champion. Last year 2021 two other women were added to that but it's a it's a pretty small small group there. One competition that I'll never forget was at US Nationals. It was with my women's four-way team we were the first women's team to get on the podium at US Nationals so we got third place done plenty where I've gotten gold and silvers but that third place was was was pretty great. There's been 26 women in jumping positions on the team. The women's four-way team was was done and I was the only one that was continuing on in competition I had to really self-advocate for myself to be a part of the A team open lineup for four-way. I convinced them that I at least deserved a a shot nobody ever looked back after that. If it's something that you want to do like it's just gonna take you just have to be your own advocate. I don't think that a lot of women consider that it's something they can do. You know on the road I've had so many people come up to me I didn't know women could do this which is why representation is so important. There are certain gender stereotypes that we're getting better about but some of those stereotypes would not have expected women to be skydivers or in the military. It's just kind of crossing that threshold. I have had a lot of women reach out to me and say that they saw me at a competition or they saw me jumping and that that meant a lot to them. I think that I have been able to to kind of show people that these things are possible for women. I'm just here like everybody else like trying to make skydiving my life.